


Caught By the Sun

by metal_eye



Series: Caught by the Sun [1]
Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Adolescent Sexuality, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Middle School, Awkward Boners, Bees, Bonfires, Cabin AU, First Kiss, First Time, Idiots in Love, M/M, Skinny Dipping, Summer, Summer Romance, Summer Vacation, Symbolic Thunderstorms, Young Love, alternate universe - cabin, sand
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-16
Updated: 2016-10-24
Packaged: 2018-04-26 14:50:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 19,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5008870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/metal_eye/pseuds/metal_eye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He came every summer. It wasn’t even a question. Harry and his parents—one step, one real—picked up their lives, packed it into a car, and drove long enough to land at the ends of the earth.</p><p>"The cabin had been in his family for a hundred years. There was no TV, no phone, no computer, no radio. There were decks of cards and plastic deer and marbles. There were skis and leaves and a tree house.</p><p>"And then there was Louis."</p><p>Or, Harry and Louis meet every summer at the lake.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Bright

**Author's Note:**

> So this is the longest damn thing I've ever written for any fandom! Go me!
> 
> I wanted to turn my fiction around and write about action, activities, things that people are doing instead of just words and emotions. And the best way to do that was to draw memories from the lake cabin I've been going to every summer since I was a blathering baby. 
> 
> You form a weird bond with people and things that only come once a year. They become mythical, like legends or bedtime stories. 
> 
> Of course there is a playlist, because... everything deserves a playlist.
> 
> Ash - Walking Barefoot  
> Manic Street Preachers - Divine Youth  
> Simply Waiting - Carefree  
> Rosanne Cash - House on the Lake  
> Alison Goldfrapp & Will Gregory - Meeting in the Moors  
> Inme - This Town  
> My Chemical Romance - Summertime  
> Lori Carson - Fourth of July  
> One Direction - They Don't Know About Us  
> Lymbyc Systym - Late Night Classic  
> Art of Fighting - Moonlight  
> Olivia Lufkin - Alone in our Castle  
> Craig Armstrong - Childhood 2  
> This Will Destroy You - Black Dunes  
> Enya - Paint the Sky with Stars  
> The Cure - The Last Day of Summer  
> Nick Jonas - Santa Barbara  
> Kris Allen - Out Alive  
> R.E.M. - Electrolite
> 
>  
> 
> For Otsego.

_We didn’t have very long_  
_While we chased down the sunlight_  
_Cornered and careless_  
_Corrupted_  
_Caught by the sun_  


 

When Harry first found the house, he didn’t quite understand how it fit. It was behind the woods, somehow, a bit beyond where his grandparents stayed. Up until the house were pine needles and pinecone obstacles, safe for bare feet but forbidden to anything fancy.

Going through the trees across the dry, dead leaves led him to a green lawn, mowed and trimmed, sturdily surrounding a large house with white walls, giant windows, and a big satellite dish on the roof that must have caught television waves—except television was never an option for Harry on the lake, so the giant dish stood surreally like an alien spacecraft, boasting its presence, almost demanding sound effects.

He didn’t like the house at all until he saw the boy coming out of it, wearing shorts and sneakers and sliding his hair back with one hand as if he were expecting wind.

Harry was barefoot, as always, and pine pitch held his toes together fast, despite nerves.

“Hi,” Harry said to the boy, unsure of how he could connect to someone so clean and prepared.

The boy turned his head and stumbled over the leg of a large trampoline in his path, knocking his knees and swearing, giving an “Oops” in deep embarrassment.

Harry stepped forward slightly, onto the pristine grass. He felt dirty but not unwelcome. “What’s your name?”

The boy in white shorts was clutching his knee and wincing but looked reluctant to be caught off guard. “M’Louis,” he said. “Ow.”

“Do you need some hydrogen peroxide?” Harry asked, recalling the loathed substance every adult insisted on applying to the most inconsequential wounds.

“No,” said the boy—Louis, Harry corrected, like a kid born on a French plantation forgetting everything but the pronunciation of his own name.

“Okay,” said Harry, already ready to run. “ _Louis_.”

The boy stood up straight. “Who are you?” he asked, rubbing one knee but trying to hide his discomfort.

“Harry. M’ten.”

“Want to jump on the trampoline, Harry?”

Harry did, very much. He didn’t remember the last time he’d had a trampoline. “My feet are dirty,” he said, looking down.

“S’okay,” said Louis. “Dirt never hurt anybody.”

Harry smiled, stepped back a moment, and made a running leap for the trampoline—but his deer-legs proved too long and chose to hang off the edge while the rest of him landed backwards and bounced up like he’d fallen on an inflatable raft from the old cobwebbed garage.

Even if Louis’ grass was too green and his house was too white and his beach was too parched and sandy (it needed more frogs or dead fish or something), Harry felt adventurous and welcome.

 

He came every summer. It wasn’t even a question. Harry and his parents—one step, one real—picked up their lives, packed it into a car, and drove long enough to land at the ends of the earth.

The cabin had been in his family for a hundred years. There was no TV, no phone, no computer, no radio. There were decks of cards and plastic deer and marbles. There were skis and leaves and a tree house.

And then there was Louis.

 

Harry had never _driven_ to the State Park before. It felt a little like cheating.

“You have to _pay?”_ Harry asked, incredulous.

“Yeah,” said Louis. “You don’t?”

Harry shook his head. “We always just canoed over with a picnic.”

Louis’ eyes widened. “You can _do_ that?”

Harry nodded. When they parked and got out of Louis’ mom’s car, he felt weird and wrong, like he didn’t deserve it. The beach was the same—the buoys still bobbed like oversized crayons, the sandbar was still there, and seagulls still scouted for snacks. But without the lake trip—the journey through the mist—it was like Avalon minus the magic. Harry pouted a bit.

“Let’s get ice cream!” said Louis, pointing to a building.     

As he was dragged by Louis’ hand up a wooden set of stairs, Harry thought hey, this is new. “I never knew they served ice cream here,” he said. Louis just grinned.

Inside, there were rainbow slushies and milkshakes and toffee crunch in giant tubs. The prices were arranged above the counter with plastic letters that were spaced funny and sometimes had to substitute a backwards “3” for an “E”. Wooden tables waited behind them in the sun, though most people took their sweets back down to the beach.

Louis was looking at him curiously. “What do you want, then?” he asked.

Harry was flabbergasted. How could he have been to this beach so many times and _never_ been inside the ice cream shop?

"Harry?” Louis asked again.

“I want everything,” he said.

They both laughed and ended up getting cones with scoops of mint chocolate chip and sitting on one side of a picnic table, slurping. Harry thought the whole thing was pretty magical, even without a canoe or a picnic.

 

About thirty minutes from the lake was a park of giant pine trees—like the Redwoods in California, Harry explained, only not as famous. They were pretty damn impressive anyways, once he and Louis dragged the adults out of the welcome center with dioramas and boring words on the walls. Why look at fake trees when you could see the real thing?

Despite prevalent pavement, weaving in and out of the woods was the only way to appreciate these ancient growths, and Harry stayed close to Louis the whole way. Near the end there was a tree so big it was supposed to take three people to hold hands around its massive trunk, but when Harry flattened himself against it and reached to the other side, he could feel a trail of energy wrapping towards Louis’ fingertips—pulsing like a wave from a boat’s wake—and he thought they could wrap halfway around the whole world, if they wanted to.

 

At the top of the sand dune, Harry decided it was time to tell Louis the story of Big Bear.

“So many people,” said Louis. “So much _sand_.”

“It wasn’t always sand,” Harry said, taking the words very seriously, forming them into segments somehow worthy of a legend.

“Don’t be stupid,” said Louis, then checked himself. “I mean. You’re not stupid. I didn’t mean that. Sorry.”

Harry pulled Louis’ hands toward him and sat down on the warm dune, feeling it form to his figure. Kids cartwheeled all around them, took pictures, careened left and right. He clutched their hands together, keeping close. “The legend goes like this,” he began.

“A mother bear and her two cubs tried to swim across the big lake, looking for food. But a storm came, nearly drowning them. The mother bear made it to shore, and she lay down, exhausted. Waiting.

“Her two cubs drowned. Those two islands out there,” Harry continued, “are her cubs who never made it to shore. But the mother never gave up hope. She lay down on the beach and waited… and waited… until eventually, she turned into sand.”

“That’s so sad.” Louis’ blue eyes brimmed with tears. “We’re sitting on a sad, dead bear?”

 “Maybe,” said Harry. “Or maybe it’s just a lot of sand.”

Louis kicked at the dune, spraying it, carving its surface with a stuck heel. “I think it’s just sand,” he said. “I think those stories are too damn depressing.”

Harry thought, _not ours. Our story is going to be a happy one._

“Race you down,” he said.

 

And that’s how it was, the summers. They traded stories, different traditions. Harry taught Louis how to catch minnows and Louis showed Harry how to count shooting stars on the roof of his house. Harry tried to tell Louis about the three-eyed monster in the lake that only ate Oreo cookies, and Louis laughed, but later told Harry about the road ghost patrolling up and down the paved road to town. And though Harry’s lake had always been wild and lush and apart from civilization, Louis’ lake seemed like an extension of his own self—lucky and arbitrary and easy and free.

Except, of course, where his father was involved.

 

When Harry invited Louis to the bonfire, he hadn’t really considered the possibility that he would say no.

“But… it’s a big fire, and we sing,” said Harry.

“Why does the fire have to be big? Isn’t it like, a fire hazard? My dad would say it’s a fire hazard.”

Harry had never considered such a thing. He supposed that growing up during summers when he and his cousins would put on fabulously un-PC headdresses and beat on tupperware while running around the fire and howling at the moon might be considered wild, strange, scary. Especially for someone with a movie theater and exercise room in their huge lake house, and a father who seemed completely absent until something fun was about to happen. “I mean, you don’t have to come, I guess,” he said, shuffling his feet and scraping up moss with his toes.

“I can’t sing, anyway,” Louis muttered.

Harry started and looked up. “That’s not true!” he said, more plaintive than he meant to be. “That’s crap! You can sing.”

“How would you know?” he muttered, the cracked temperment calling for reassurance, searching for solidarity. Someone had said otherwise.

“Your voice,” Harry began, frustrated. “You sound like a _bird_.”

Louis eyes sought for a lie, and finding none, fluttered down in wonder.

“And songbirds, see. They _always_ sing.”

 

It was dark and sort of barbaric and all the adults were drunk, clinking beers and getting far too close to lighter fluid, and instead of running around the fire with feathers in his hair, Harry held Louis’ arm and thought for the first time about tradition and its implications, about growth and knowledge and games that no longer seemed harmless.

Nobody mentioned his lack of participation. Harry always remembered hating the later segment of the bonfire—the boring songs, the awkward rounds, the misplayed harmonies.

Except Louis started singing, quiet and shy, unsure of the words but caught in the melody, and he hit some wrong notes but Harry could barely breathe, relaxing happily into his major thirds and lying amonst the rhythms like a swaying fern from the forest. Half his relatives sang like screechy truck wheels and didn’t care. Louis sang like a jay and hardly held his own.

Embers later, Louis walked home in Harry’s jacket. It wasn’t really cold, but Harry’s cabin was much closer, and he could find it without a flashlight. Louis had to walk farther.

Harry’d tucked a feather into the inside pocket of the jacket. He imagined Louis finding it, imagined his excited bird voice carrying up to the stars like the highest sparks of the fire.


	2. Haze

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Harry told Louis to bring his rain boots and said he’d be waiting by the big septic tank."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ummm. Here we go again. I've never written anything with multiple chapters, so I have no idea what to say here.
> 
> Thanks for reading if you do? Or if you don't.

_When the lights go out_  
_Will you take me with you?_

 

“Why is your mailbox so far away?” Louis shuffled his feet, delaying.

Harry squinted at the ground. He walked in the sand divots of the old road, scouting the moss, sometimes tip-toeing.

“It’s not even a real road—”

“Shh!” whispered Harry suddenly. “Look.”

A tiny toad was hopping up the path, having launched out of nowhere and landed in silence upon the moss like it was somewhere cars had never been.

Nobody spoke.

Louis moved to catch the creature in his open palm, covering it like a won goldfish in a plastic bag at the fair.

When Louis looked up, Harry said, “That’s why I like to go get the mail.” Except he wasn’t only talking about the tree toads, and Louis seemed to understand that. “Can I see?”

Louis opened his hand and the tiny thing hopped off onto a tree root and into the ferns. “Whoops.”

When he looked back at Harry, their faces were so close they could almost touch. “Um,” said Harry, ducking his head a bit. “Sorry.”

Louis coughed, strangely, like a polite adult wishing for attention, then turned to keep walking, eyes trained on sunspots in the old road.

Harry trailed behind, road forgotten. He wasn’t sure what had just happened.

The mailbox door screeched when it opened like it hadn’t seen the sun in ages.

 

While young, most of their beach experiences bypassed tanning and boating and looking cooler than they possibly could, because the combination of sand and mud at this lake depth made for _perfect_ pancakes—slapped authoritatively on wooden dock planks like they were restaurant grills. Louis taught Harry the ease of an assembly line, spouting something about being older and wiser (by a matter of months).

“Just cause you’re older doesn’t mean your traditions are better,” came Harry’s mumble, admittedly ages before he expected to feel such bitterness.

“That’s not—no, I know.”

The pancake making continuned in silence.

“Teach me something,” Louis tried.

“Like what?” Dock pancakes were fun, even if Harry didn’t want to admit it yet.

Louis paused. “Something important to you.”

Harry showed him how to make witch castles.

They picked up fingerfuls of watery sand. Harry held Louis’ hands in a web, just far apart enough to let the sand through, and made circular motions. The wet sand built upon itself in sinister, aggressive swirls.

“That’s so cool!” said Louis. “It’s like soft serve ice cream!”

Harry scowled, then softened. They made a whole village.

 

Time passed differently at the lake.

It was all slowed down, floating on experience instead of hours, waiting for revelations instead of rushing by them. They didn’t call each other or write letters during the school year. Only the summers were theirs. But those months were such slow-dripping, syrupy times that several weeks somehow matched the rest of the year. For Harry, lying flushed against Louis’ bedframe while the rain pounded outside seemed to last as long as a whole week of listening to a teacher spout the existential importance of dividing by zero.

He jumped from ten to eleven to twelve, skipping entire years in his mind just to find himself on the lake beside Louis, where he belonged.

 

It was so early the sun was a mere suggestive glow across the water.

“Louis,” Harry whispered, shaking his shoulder. “ _Louis_.”

“Mmphf,” said Louis.

“Want to go to the frog bog? My whole family’s going,” he chirped.

“Frogs? Wait—how are you in here? Is—”

“Shh. S’okay.” Harry covered Louis’ mouth. “Your dad’s asleep.”

“What time is it?”

“Six.”

“Christ, Harry.”

“You don’t have to go.”

“No.” Louis rubbed his eyes and sat up. “I want to go.” He stopped. “Wait, go where?”

Smiling and resisting an explanation, Harry told Louis to bring his rain boots and said he’d be waiting by the big septic tank.

Car rides away from the lake were always sordid affairs. Roads wound like snakes and barely got repair from yearly snow, swerving through trees like an ungainly Chutes and Ladders gameboard. “I’m gonna be sick,” Louis kept threatening—though Harry liked to think of his dramatics as an excuse to put his head in Harry’s lap. And where had that come from?

“We’re almost there,” Harry murmured, except he almost wished they weren’t, threading bony fingers through Louis’ fringe, trying not to read into it too much but still willing for a random surge of backwoods traffic.

“Here,” Harry’s stepdad was saying, two minutes later. Harry oughtta sue… somebody.

“We’re here,” he whispered instead to Louis, who vaguely stirred.

“Where?”

“The frog bog.”

The name held a magical, musical tone for Harry, but Louis sat up and looked through bleary eyes like he was crazy.

Harry pulled him out of the vehicle and onto the grass, where cousins were pulling on rubber boots and Harry’s stepdad struggled with a pair of waders. Louis still looked a little pale, but Harry grinned encouragement at him, attempting to convey the years and minutes he had spent preparing to walk onto this marsh.

Ten minutes through the forest brought them to the edge of a clearing, and following his stepfather (father?), Harry step-fathered excitedly onto a fragile bank that sank and held his boot fast like quicksand, like he was a superhero suctioning his way up a building.

Several yards in, Harry shook Louis’ shoulder and pointed excitedly. “Venus flytrap.”

Louis’ eyes widened. “I thought those were a _myth_.”

“Nature is weird,” said Harry. “And awesome.”

Together they got closer, cautious even though they outnumbered and outweighed the killer plant. They watched a gnat get too close to the unlikely predator’s nectar bowl and get swallowed—killed—sucked up like in a sci-fi movie—scene suddenly urgent—

But seconds long.

They were there two hours and didn’t catch any frogs, but the sounds of bloated bullfrogs blasted out like tubas in the pit of an orchestra; the moss gave up all solidarity with its squelch; the knowledge that their tresspass was accepted yet not sanctioned—these things remained and dizzied up their brains, fluttered like moths, followed them home to the lake on beacons of light (where Louis’ dad shooed him inside, ever suspicious of something, and a faint “bye harry” tumbled between the pine trees).

 

They were skipping stones.

“Do you ever think about, like, not coming here?”

It was a loaded question, after a number of summers. But Louis took it on like a bench press of fifty-odd pounds. “What do you mean?”

“Like you grew out of it. Like you could miss a year and it wouldn’t matter.” The words were painful. Harry tried to skip something too round and it fell into the shallow water with a _thunk_.

“No,” said Louis, spinning a perfect slice of shale that made enough ripples to go on for miles.

And that was that.

 

“Trespassing,” said Louis.

“No. Wild Things.”

Technically there was a pine path along the shore—maintained, groomed, welcomed—a fucking _given_. Harry had to learn how some of the new owners of land didn’t like to share—that their yards lead into swamps, cement steps, private beaches with boats pulled up past the rocky shallows.

There had always been a path, and Harry refused to give up on it.

Halfway down the cove, Louis paused, blue eyes churning with curiosity. “Why Wild Thing Point?” he asked.

Harry shrugged. “Looks like a Maurice Sendak painting. That one tree—” flat on top, yet somehow mischievous— “could hide so many monsters.”

So they carried on. Harry neglected to explain that what had seemed wild and mysterious from a distance eventally became just another lonely sandbar beach trying to escape the plastic fixtures and encroaching homes.

The last time they walked to Wild Thing Point there was a swingset built so close to the monster tree that Harry could barely remember what had made the tree so mysterious in the first place. So he sat into the edge of the remaining sand, and Louis sat next to him, and they kicked at rocks and seaweed and dead fish like it might wake a sleeping sea dragon.

 

Blueberry Point lasted a little longer. Aptly named for the wild blueberries that could be collected there for pies, the point retained proper houses with wooden planks and gardens, bee traps on the side with dead fish hung for bait above buckets, and shallow shores with darty minnows chasing after something invisible in every pool of lilies along the way.

There were several docks at the start that Louis always needed help stepping over, and Harry happily obliged, grabbing forearms that thickened over years, holding hipbones that suddenly beared flesh, smiling dimply at a face that went from round to gaunt to angled over the years.

He didn’t ask about it. Harry assumed it was like every boy’s experience—like his own: preteen enthusiasm chased by shame, high school pressure; puberty bending out of the body-seams at all the wrong times. Awkward boners. Giant limbs. Cracked voices when they tried to comment on the slowly declining supply of blueberries: “Nope, that’s a—eeecchh—patch of rogue weed.”

“Damn. You’re right. Haven’t seen half the berries we normally do.”

Not what he wanted to say. How do you express yourself, Harry thought, to someone who seemed to be equally and inconveniently speechless?

All this—the new voices, leg pains, patches of hair—Harry didn’t ultimately think it would matter.

But it did. It mattered in a way he had never even counted on.


	3. Dive

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Louis laughed, and it was glorious, and Harry was reminded of why he kept showing this boy his sacred things."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A bit shorter than usual. Sorry. 
> 
> Water themed.

_Disarmed by your charm_  
_That night, I felt it again_  
_Addictive and consuming_  
_Love's sweet pain_

 

With all his love for nature, Harry had expected that fishing would come naturally to him.

“Goddammit,” he mumbled for the third time as his casting attempt buried itself in the boat’s buoy rope. Louis looked on, giggling again. “Snag,” he quipped.

Newly teenaged Harry had trouble keeping his head. “Why the hell are there so many snags? What does this accomplish? Why are we fishing in the goddamn weeds?”

His frustration reigned even when he knew that Louis had explained the concept of a fish farm to him many times. It’s where fish go, gunning for a hiding place, chilling in dead branches instead of dangerously open water.

It made a bit of sense, didn’t it? Safety amongst the solid wood. Like Harry’s bedroom in the cabin—thin, sure, stood on stones, but so much more safe than a layer of white plaster.

“Got one, I think.” Louis pulled at his rod, not reeling—not yet—trying to “tire the fish out,” he explained.

It was tiny. Harry felt bad for wanting to take it home.

Louis turned his net inside out and let it go.

“But you caught it?” keened Harry, sort of confused.

Louis shrugged. “You can’t keep everything.”

He seemed resigned. The wind was cold.

They paddled back to shore in silence, dragging their aluminum craft far enough ashore that a goddamn hurricane would have trouble dislocating the hull.

The sand was barely wide enough. The beach was volatile. Comfort in sand came in rare intervals, often preceded by drought.

One year the boat just floated away. Maybe the water rose, or the wind was too strong; but when Harry stepped carefully down to the water—on rocky steps, full of decay—the empty sand stretched to both coves, miles long, uninteruppted except by dock and boat and stretches of strange, burly civilization.

 

When you’re thirteen, slathering buttery baking oil onto yourself at the start of a marathon swim should have no implications beyond an immediate mode of thermal armor.

“Ew,” Harry said, and Louis nodded.

It was supposed to protect them from chill, layer a barrier like whale blubber while they attempted to swim as far as they possibly could from the Marina to the far length of the lake. For Harry, it just ended up being an excuse to lather each other up in something like sunscreen without consequence or second guessing.

It was more of a crazy challenge than a realistic goal. They kept at it for several coves, then Louis gave in first, climbing into the rowboat with palpable relief. Harry kept on for a mile or two, grimacing past the lurking seaweed, digging for solace in the bits of chocolate Louis fed to him over the side of the boat. Harry always lingered a bit long above the water for his hand-off, trying to stretch not the moment he could breathe, but the second designed solely for sugar, sustenance, and the texture of Louis’s small fingers.

“I’m going to keep swimming until I can’t go on!” Half of Harry wanted to best Louis at his own game; the other half just wanted into the boat with towels and warmth and chocolate. And the longer he struggled through the cold and muscle exhaustion, the stupider being victorious seemed. What the hell was he winning?

“… okay. I can’t go on.”

Harry’s mother laughed and she and Louis hauled Harry into the boat. And here was his prize: wrapping himself up in Louis’s towel, drying off, Crisco melting to make room for skin.

They broke pieces of chocolate in half and rowed home, caught at an impasse but satisfied they had conquered something huge.

 

There had always been an outdoor shower on the side of the large cabin where Harry’s cousins stayed. Though everyone knew it was there, it still felt like a secret—secluded on the far side of the house, blended in brown wood like it only appeared when they needed it (otherwise forgotten).

There were still traces of grease on their skin. Harry dragged Louis from the shore to the soft moss that grew behind the larger house. “Shower,” Harry said, more encouragement than suggestion, and Louis nodded.

Harry opened the hinged door and started the water, waving Louis away, as it always took several minutes to get warm. He also scoured the metal hooks for spiders, the wooden posts for ants or irridescent webs. Not that bugs were threatening. It was just courtesy, or something. (Okay, he didn’t want Louis uncomfortable or scared.)

His fingers found comfort in the temperature, finally, and they both stepped in; and Harry latched the wooden door with fingers too soft, perhaps in trepidation.

“Right.” Harry leaned one one side of the small stall, Louis on the other. “God, we stink.”

Louis laughed, and it was glorious, and Harry was reminded of why he kept showing this boy his sacred things.

They showered carefully, scrubbing their own arms in relative silence, trying to be grown-ups about it. They were teenagers, after all—far beyond giggles and awkward grins, surely.

“My suit’s still full of grease,” said Louis, making a face—then mumbling a small word that shoudn’t have been needed: “Sorry.”

Harry had never thought very much about his own sexuality before Louis pulled his swimsuit off in that small wooden outside shower. Dropping wet fabric against the planks, Louis completely sealed some kind of embarrassment (attraction? death sentence?) that Harry had been distinctly trying to avoid.

Christ. Harry was sure this was not supposed to happen—to him, to Louis, to anyone. He was fucking it up. He was making something out of nothing. He was bringing new sentiment into childhood memories. Bringing dirt. Something dark and otherwise unwelcome.

Except. “Harry,” Louis said.

Looking up, Harry clutched his hands to the front of his swim shorts like they could actually speak and he wanted to shut them up.

“Harry, chill. There’s no weirdness, I swear. S’just the same as before.”

Harry stared, his hands still awkardly covering his crotch, and when an accented shudder came down his spine, he realized that wasn’t what he wanted Louis to say at all.


	4. Sweat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "The first time Harry came he was slightly terrified, stumbling out of his sleeping bag and into the tiny bathroom, splashing water onto his face and heaving, feeling a little like he’d just puked."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long delay on this-- lots on my plate, a backlog, etc etc. Things finally start to get (slightly) sexy now. About time, eh?

_So the siren went off—it chased you out of your mind_  
_Just when I started to grow a garden_  
_How selfish of me_  
_But I need something to build on to_  
_You can’t leave me here_

 

The bright red boat with the outboard motor made so much noise it was hard to think of much else when around it, and Harry went waterskiing a lot. It wasn’t even enjoyable, really—just cold and fast and full of nerves. The rush was all right; he got pretty good on two skis, though he never managed the finesse and balance required for one, and it was something he could only do at the lake.

“Wanna go skiing?” he asked Louis one day, a little daring and self-important and light on his toes.

“Not really,” Louis answered. “Skiing sucks.”

It took a few more tries before Harry understood how badly he needed someone to say that.

Skiing was a status contest, not a hobby. He had to keep up with his cousins on all counts, and despite his own hesitancy, Harry had been pulled into it, eventually believing that a simple wake cross was the achievement of gods. Skis had become symbols of stature: sometimes wooden, often wide; always waiting for feet to make something more of them.

The truth was that when the boat engine idled before hitting the gas, it sounded like a great gurgling monster waiting to pounce. Harry didn’t like admitting that it freaked him out a little and that he silently wished the motor would die every time he waded in to grab the tow rope. And every time he fell victim to a rogue wave, a rush of shame chased him under the water.

Thus, on one otherwise miserable day as Harry traced his feet in the water on his cousin’s aluminum dock, waiting for his turn, Louis came over, dragging a giant inner tube inflated past neon with hard handles and a rope tow ready for its strength test.

“Skiing’s a pissing contest,” Louis explained. “Even my dad always got the neighbors to take him, beach-starting just to show me how pathetic I was for floundering in the deep.” He cut himself off, then sat down on the tube, brushing off a few pine needles. “This thing is fun,” he said. “Not, you know, pretend-so-you-can-impress-people fun, but actually—”

“Let’s go,” Harry smiled, already grateful.

 

Even though the rope sprayed so much they needed goggles to see; even when their knees knocked together hard enough to bruise the next day; even when a huge wave hit and knocked Harry off—Louis followed closely, and would insist it was an accident, but Harry like to think it was a way to make him feel less stupid—even then, the tube was more fun than a billion skiing attempts, and every time Harry plunged underwater, it was with glee _,_ not shame.

 

So Harry tried to fall into predictability, into morning boat trips and calls for lunch, which usually consisted of the previous night’s leftovers mixed with chicken broth in a bowl plus turkey between half-slices of whole wheat bread to balance the taste.

Except that he was now ever-conscious of distance, of gaps between his and Louis’s bare legs, of caution when he handed the iced tea pitcher over. Nothing had changed, not really; their limbs still found each other under the table like the cautious stems of water lilies, but Harry would look at Louis and feel embarrased because he couldn’t keep his thoughts to himself.

 

Sometimes the boat ran out of gas and Harry’s mum had to drive them down to the marina, which looked just like a gas station except boats pulled up to the pump stations in rows. Sometimes Harry got out and ran down the dock to the mart to buy gum, then ran back. Sometimes Louis got out of the boat and walked up and down past the gas pumps, searching for something Harry didn’t understand, scratching his arms and looking slant and then squinting at Harry through the sun like he was snowblind instead of engulfed in summer, and well—there was that shame, again, beating against Harry’s breastbones like a trapped bird.

           

Most nights in the cabin were composed of complete silence beyond the occasional cricket and Harry’s noisy attempts at nestling into a bunk made for someone half his age and height. There were no car sounds. No city sounds. The walls were so, so thin; the back bedroom barely kept sturdy when the wind was wailing, and he could hear things in his parents’ room that he really didn’t want to. Such old wood—nearly̶ a hundred—and thinnest at the back of the coat closet, which was practically a sound conductor.

It wasn’t a conscious decision.

Harry was, after all, newly thirteen, virile, unsure, and slightly obsessed with a neighbor who was only available at quarter-year intervals. And how was Harry to know what this meant, what his new body wanted, what happened when you grew up and discovered a kind of energy that didn’t burn away regardless of exertion or intent?

So on some nights he found himself searching with his fingers, wandering down beneath his sleeping bag, retaining a sense of guilt despite the established noise from his parents’ room (gods clear his ears from that), curious, so curious—and— _oh_.

Rhythmic ease led to vocalizations Harry wasn’t prepared for, particularly when a small stroke made way for a guttural moan, then inevitably, “ _Louis_.” And there it was. The thing he’d been trying to push back and ignore.

Harry failed, those nights in his bed. He had no idea what he was doing and still voiced Louis’s name, imagining his clean, swept torso; his crinkly smile; the way his backside dipped first into the water when they climbed down the dock metal legs to the mud, daring to find something buried or dangerous… imagining his skin, again. And again. _Again_.

The first time Harry came he was slightly terrified, stumbling out of his sleeping bag and into the tiny bathroom, splashing water onto his face and heaving, feeling a little like he’d just puked. Dreading a return to the stained wool in his bunk.

He ended up tiptoeing back and sleeping on top of the sleeping bag, running his fingers over the exterior fabric, trying to come up with a reason for his body’s determination to complicate the easiest friendship he’d ever had.

Harry woke curled into the furthest possible corner of his bed without falling out of it. He’d done that, once—rolled over too many times and ended up on the floor, sleepy and pretending it didn’t hurt. Harry couldn’t remember how he’d made it back to bed—except this time he was already there, cornered and sleepy, wishing he could be back on the floor, somewhere crooked but at least familiar, and waiting.

 

On some warm moonlit nights after thinking of Louis, Harry wanted to wade into the lake to wash off and catch moonbeams like a water witch.

 

Weather at the lake was predictably chilly, enough so that the mornings required a fire and high noon was bright enough for sunbathing. But then there were the times that the air stuck to his skin like stale tree sap, and as dark as it got, it never cooled off enough to sleep.

“Let’s go skinny dipping,” Louis said one night. They were lying side by side in the woven hammock with ice cubes on their necks, and the crickets were deafening.

“What?” Harry’s limbs began to numb with that familiar shiver that started at his lower spine, thinking of the wooden nights in his tiny bedroom, _Louis_ echoing off the walls like a secret password.

“So hot.” Louis stretched like a cat. “’m sweaty. We should dunk ourselves underwater so it’s easier to sleep.”

Thankfully killing any expected response, Louis gathered his limbs and hopped off to the ground, the picture of low-key cool. Harry suffered the physics of balance and toppled over onto the moss like a lump. “Right,” he roughed out, scratching faintly at the earth like he could sink right into it and avoid the whole situation.

They grabbed towels from the backyard clothesline and tiptoed cautiously, as if to surprise the water, down to the bar of sand that passed for a beach.

Outer layers were easy. It was so goddamn hot. Shirts and shorts and shoes came off in silence.

“Well,” said Harry, looking down at his flubby, strange figure, wishing it looked different all of a sudden (and what the hell was that?). “I’ll go when you go.”

“Okay.” Louis’s legs were perched like an Olympic sprinter’s. “On the count of three.”

“One…”

“Two…”

“THREE!”

No fake-outs, just terry towels tossed aside as Harry scrambled past the shallow rocks to a safe, waist-deep space. Louis did the same but then kept going, wading deeper into the muck until his only neck and head poked out of the water, like a boat buoy. Harry eventually followed, clasping his arms around himself, self-conscious in ways he hadn’t ever experienced.

“C’mon,” said Louis, dancing across the lake mud in watery slow motion. “Don’t do that.” He untangled Harry’s limbs and clasped both their hands high above his head. “The point is to be shameless,” he said.

“And to cool off,” said Harry.

"Yeah,” said Louis. “That.”

It was so different from wearing a swimsuit. To feel the slow laps of waves against his bare skin, to have lake water tickling the new hairs below his hips.

Harry looked around. The shores were pitch black. It was a night in the middle of the week, weekend partiers absent while permanent residents past 60 chose to sleep. He looked up, and the massive map of stars threatened to sink into his eyes like glittery cobwebs.

He looked forward, and Louis’s eyes were right there, expectant. “Harry,” he said.

What the hell, it was nearly midnight and they were both naked and drenched, but Harry said “Yeah?”, trying to keep it simple.

Louis grinned like an elf. “Catch me.”

He turned and charged beachward; Harry followed him with splashes, and they eventually collapsed onto the sand, laughing and close, allowing for stillness but unsure of motion.


	5. Burn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Harry wasn’t exactly an adult or even well into being a teenager, but he was pretty sure that kissing people was supposed to be more than all right."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this is taking so long. I'm dredging up a lot of lake memories. This one took me longer to write than usual, but I'm not sure if it was writer's block or because I hate writing Harry being attacked by hornets.
> 
> Yeah, that happens. Sorry. There's cuddling, though.

_Your eyes are burning holes through me_  
_I’m gasoline_  
_I’m burning clean_

 

Harry liked to think that nothing bad ever happened at the lake. Which wasn’t really true, of course—he was just very good at forgetting mishaps in favor of the good things. His memories formed from brushing waist-high ferns aside on the way to the old tree house instead of from the time the raccoons got into the garbage and spread it all over camp. He buried awkward adolescent moments under pleasant afternoons with colored pencils and birch bark.

But one year he stepped in a hornet’s nest, and that was hard to forget.

He’d been playing hide and seek with Louis. Or a modified version, really—just the two of them choosing to count and then conveniently run after the only other person there. It was more akin to tag, or capture the flag, or whatever the hell it was when there weren’t enough people to play but Harry needed some excuse to see Louis that wasn’t just “I like to look at you.”

He’d chosen to hide on the shallow beach, in the underbrush, convinced Louis would be wandering the shores forever, looking for him. It didn’t seem like a bad prospect at the time, forever—just out of sight, always right before supper, sun catching the trees and waves licking at the shore, no need to pretend and no need to go back.

He tiptoed slowly between soil and sand, clutching the limbs of young trees and looking everywhere but where his feet were going. He had to stay quiet. He had to—

His foot was suddenly swallowed by a land mine, or a bear trap, or a foxhole—there weren’t any foxes up here, though—and his ankle twisted under his weight from the fall. It hurt, badly, but he was only able to contemplate the pain for somewhere between six and eleven seconds before the buzzing began.

When he looked down, hundreds or maybe _thousands_ of insects had eclipsed his lower leg like a gold and black plague, stinging and crawling upwards and vicious with fury. Harry heard himself let out a creaky cry of pain and surprise before the hornets were in his face, too, buzzing and attacking over and over, and for the first time he could remember, Harry was actually afraid for his life.

He was not a screamer, but he _screamed—_ something high and inconsolable. Swatting, shaking, hopping out of the hole in the ground, limping desperately downwards to the beach and water and somehow—

“Haz?” he heard, somewhere far away in his brain.

Water, he thought. _Water_. The stings were like hot knives, worse than any scrape or sprain he’d ever had. His foot was on _fire_. He could barely see through the swarm in front of his face. And for the only year since he was six, Harry was grateful for a thin bar of sand between shore and lake, between disaster and safety.

He dove in, splashing out further from the beach, nearly crying from the pain. But the hornets followed him. Some were even stuck in his hair.

“Harry!” he heard again, vacantly.

He dragged himself out deeper still, bugs swirling above his head like some kind of fucked up halo. He was still fully clothed as he submerged himself and hunkered down to the muck like a sunken log, where he held his breath for longer than he ever had before.

He almost lost himself, in his brain, without air. Nothing told him to hurry, except—

“HARRY!”

Then he was coughing, kicking his bad foot and losing his shoe in the sand but determined to come back up, spitting water like a fountain or a whale—

“Oh god, Harry—”

Someone was pulling him up and out of the water, gripping his shirt and crashing to shore. In moments they collapsed on solid ground, scrounging for each other, flopping gangly limbs over phrases that meant safety. _You’re okay. I’ve got you. It burns. They’re gone._

Eventually, Harry looked up and said uselessly, “I lost my shoe.”

It had seemed like a good thing to say because the shoe was one of a brand new pair that he’d begged to have for who knows how long. But when a pathetic wave lapped his at his still-burning ankle, Harry just shut up and let himself be grateful for Louis’ hands.

“What shoe? Harry, I thought you were _dying_ —christ—let me—”

Of course, Harry let him.

 

Harry was laid up in his cabin for a week. He wasn’t crippled, not really; but everything on that one leg hurt so bad he decided to stop using it, even if his cousins never came to visit.

Louis did. Louis brought over his video game system, even if Harry’s cabin had never handled so much electricity and they needed outlet adapters to make it function. Louis found petosky stones at the beach and brought them back to show Harry, who beamed because he’d taught Louis how to find them in the first place. He even brought out the plastic deer they hadn’t played with since they were kids, arranging them carefully in the folds of the wool blanket Harry lay on—so they would rattle like sentinels in another emergency, Louis said. And the whole time Harry’s swollen leg ached, but when Louis was there, it was distracted to a tickle.

 

“Why is it called the Three Bears Shack if there are only two beds?”

The question of the hour had Louis sweeping aggressively, like the dust and mold were deterrents to Harry’s answer. They had asked to camp out, maybe in the woods somewhere, and Harry’s mother had suggested the shack—just a meandering of yards beyond the back road, a path through the ferns.

Harry didn’t know, was the thing. It had always been the Three Bears Shack—maybe because there always three things in fairy tales: three tasks, three doors, three monsters to fight. But when it came down to the shack there was really only room for a bunk bed and a tiny pretend breakfast table, so it stayed the way it was—named for three with room for only two.

Harry kept his distance from the screen door, left foot still sore from the hornet incident and definitely not keen on waking any bees. So he shook out the carpets and sheets in the damp sun outside while Louis took a broom to corner cobwebs.

It took a while, but when they were done, the wooden rectangle of a building seemed downright cozy, and hopefully free of bugs (though Harry remained nervous).

After Harry’s mom made them a huge pasta dinner and it got dark, they played card games by flashlight, eating molasses cookies out of the package and calling “Gin” at all the right times. Later they leaned back into the bottom bedframe with Louis’ Gameboy, using jumps and computer deaths and electronic music as an excuse to hover over each other, breathing in triumphant gusts, arms lingering past necessary contact—at least on Harry’s part—while the pixels of a tiny screen had them squealing into the night.

"Goodnight then, Harry,” said Louis, finally, sprawled on the bottom bunk. He’d drawn the short straw, though they’d contemplated how to get Harry on the top with his ankle still bothering him, but a hand-lift from Louis eventually got him there.

"Night, Lou,” drawled Harry, clicking the big red button on the barrelly flashlight.

Shallow breathing.

“Lou?”

“Hm?”

"Do you, like—I mean… ” Harry struggled. “When you go home, where you live. I mean, I wish you lived here. But when you go home, is there anyone you like?”

He wanted to punch himself, momentarily, for breaching the subject.

“I mean, of course—”

“I have friends,” said Louis softly. “I’m not like, a loser.”

Pinches of guilt crawled into Harry’s gut like worms. “No, I know. That’s not what I meant.”

"What did you mean?”

Somehow the absolute pine-pitch dark gave Harry a gall he never thought he’d have. “Do you have a girlfriend or anything?”

Louis audibly breathed out a sigh. “Not really. I mean, girls are all right. I’ve kissed girls. Made out with them and stuff.” He paused. “It’s all right.”

Harry wasn’t exactly an adult or even well into being a teenager, but he was pretty sure that kissing people was supposed to be more than _all right_.

“Why are y—fff. Oh fuck.”

“What?”

“I think I swallowed a gnat.”

“Spit it out?”

“Too late. It went up my nose.”

Harry shifted sideways in search of the flashlight. “My uncle used to put giant bugs in his mouth on purpose. I don’t think he ever swallowed one, but he’d joke about extra protein.”

“… gross.”

Harry turned the flashlight on. “I have to pee.”

There was no ladder to the floor, so Harry’s descent was marked by his toes’ insistence on curling around the edge of the mattress Louis slept on, then leaping several feet beyond contact, eventually thudding to the floor and rolling onto his back.

“Damn,” Harry said. “Sorry.”

There was muffled giggling, then. Harry tried to stop himself, but Louis’ laughter was contagious. “Told you to take the bottom bunk,” Louis garbled, still faceplanted into a sawdust pillow.

“I know,” said Harry. “Be right back.”

He swung through the screen door and around the planted branch that held up the makeshift porch. Harry stumbled, then righted himself, then stumbled again like a stringless puppet before finding his footing and peeing into the ferns.

“Christ, Harry, you watering plants out there?”

Harry smiled and adjusted. “Just spreading the wealth.”

“The piss-wealth? You’re a weirdo.”

Harry skipped back, holding the tank of a flashlight through the screen door, somehow relishing being called a weirdo, as if it were a term of endearment.

He tried to swing his bad leg up to the metal frame of the bunk, breathing harshly when the latent swelling decided to lash out.

“Ow,” said Harry, falling backwards and trying not to be pathetic but clutching his ankle, still covered in ghost-bites, and biting his lip in frustration. “Ow.”

“Hey,” Louis said, sitting up. Harry had dropped the flashlight on the floor, giving everything an eerie glow and illuminating only certain parts of the small wooden structure: the metal bed guard, a fake glass flower, a cobweb staged in a ceiling corner they must have missed when cleaning; now irridescent, symmetrical, and ready to kill.

Harry’s eyes went wide.

“Don’t hurt yourself. Just sleep down here.”

Harry didn’t let himself think too much about it. He hopped up, perhaps exaggerating his swollen leg’s immobility; Louis scooted over, and he curled up.

“Better,” said Louis, and Harry could only hope what he meant.

“Okay.” Harry’s mumbles wanted to say more, but it was too soon. Even pressed against the same bed, barely touching Louis’ skin and still fighting off arousal, Harry held back his intended words like a hostage kept for intel, even as his insides begged for heat.


	6. Fear

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "It burns where you can’t see."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I should just resign myself to being the kind of fic author who updates once a month instead of once a week.
> 
> So, again, delayed. But I AM going to finish this, even if I'm the only larrie left standing when I do.
> 
> I made another playlist. The first one was idealism; this one relates more to the events of the story.
> 
> Six.by Seven - Bochum (Light Up My Life)  
> James Newton Howard - Tinkerbell  
> Silverchair - Waiting All Day  
> Kaki King - Bari Improv  
> R.E.M. - Nightswimming  
> Magic Dirt - Summer High  
> Snow Patrol - Crack the Shutters  
> Hope Sandoval & the Warm Inventions - Feeling of Gaze  
> Dragonette - Lay Low  
> Nine Inch Nails - 13 Ghosts II  
> The Smiths - Ask  
> Max Richter - DREAM 13 (minus even)  
> Last Leaf Down - In Dreams  
> Declan Bennett - Not Allowed  
> Imogen Heap - Closing In  
> The Twilight Singers - Last Night in Town  
> James Taylor - Fire and Rain  
> Conor Oberst - Artifact #1  
> One Direction - Home

_All I wanted was something new  
And oh baby I found it in you_

 

Harry was now fourteen and tried valiantly to be interested in girls at school during the nine months he wasn’t at the lake and couldn’t see Louis. He laughed in the locker rooms with the best of them, older boys boasting about their conquests, but it mostly felt wrong, like he was trying to be less smart or more boring or mired in the sludge of a normal existence. Being at the lake was never normal—never boring or useless or bland, just full of meaning and magic and mossy days; unhurried, thick like the wood planks crossing his cabin ceiling with a kind of ancient authority.

 

Some years the diving dock was too shallow to actually dive from. Some years the water was deep enough but Harry’s mom still panicked about the block of cement holding it down. “No diving in the direction of the rope,” she would say, and Harry would nod even though he was sure no dive of his would ever come close to the bottom, much less the cement.

This year the lake was shallow, but convincing Louis to even set foot on the dock was a lost cause. “Seagull poop,” he explained. “So gross.”

Harry tried to prove it wasn’t _all_ over the dock by climbing the short ladder (and maybe flexing his arms on the way up) to find a small spot on the edge without poop or pine needles—even if the stiff green faux-turf tickled his balls and made him want to stand right up again.

“Owl.”

“Hm?”

“The owl. Isn’t it supposed to scare the seagulls off, or something?”

Harry shrugged. “Or something.”

Louis poked at the plastic bird and stalled at the ladder, resolute against going any further. “It’s supposed to be scary.”

Harry couldn’t help himself, then. “This one isn’t,” he said, standing up to take Louis’ hand. “But if you jump off with me, I’ll show you an owl that’s _really_ scary.”

Of course, they were fourteen and supposed to be beyond being scared by anything, but thus challenged, Louis stepped the last foot onto the turf-covered dock without even bothering to avoid the bird shit and said, “Deal.”

“On three, then,” said Harry, suddenly squinting with joy.

“One…”

“Two…”

When Louis jumped before three and dragged him off the dock, Harry wasn’t too surprised, though as their clasped hands continued to hold underwater his insides buzzed and thrummed wetly through his bones all the way to shore.

 

"You have to sneak up on it,” said Harry, “or it doesn’t work.”

He’d made that up. Of course it worked. The elder cynic in him wanted to barge into the sitting room of his grandparents’ big red house and stare down their stuffed owl like a soldier. He might even look back and take Louis’ hand, pulling him up to his side while the owl kept looking, saying straight to its face, _Yes, this is important_. But then it might respond, _Do you really think this is real?_ _Three months of a yearly summer turned into a lifetime? You’ll be lucky to emerge with a memory._

“Uh,” said Louis, shaking Harry out of his head. “It’s looking at me.”

Harry said nothing; just nodded, gesturing to the other side of the room.

They tiptoed, still attempting stealth, to the opposite corner that held an ancient boom box and some great grand-relative’s reading chair. Louis looked up again, cautiously, as if a taxidermied owl with glass eyes could actually be threatening. But therein lay the fear: Harry knew the bird wasn’t alive, knew it couldn’t really see them or watch them, but for some reason its eyes always found him, regardless of how he entered the room; seeing past his pretenses, turning him to dust.     

“It’s _still_ looking at me,” Louis was saying, sinking into the moth-eaten chair, curling in on himself. “What the fuck? Why do its eyes look everywhere? Why isn’t _that_ on the diving dock?”

“Nobody’d ever dive off of it,” said Harry. The owl had won again. _Because it hides, like us,_ he thought. _The stuffed owl sits and sees and knows what goes on, but it’s a secret until you stare into its dead glass eyes and realize you’ve been found out._

“Creepy,” said Louis.

“Yeah,” said Harry. He felt exposed.

 

They had pancakes several times a week. Louis said his dad never made pancakes, just left bread and jam on the counter while he went to sit in a plastic chair in front of the dock, so naturally Harry invited Louis over—dragged him across loose porch stones at nine AM, even when it rained; pulled up a chair and grinned nearly sideways at Louis’ careful selection of the roundest pancakes as if it had something to do with their taste.

Eventually Harry found himself saying, “Pass the any-pot, please?”

Louis looked confused every time, throwing his eyes from his plate to the table, then to the fiberglass chicken resting on a saucer, regal and slightly entitled, somehow, like its porcelain curves had made history.

“Any-pot?” Louis asked, finally. “S’just a chicken full of syrup.”

Harry braced himself for embarrassment and began to relay every detail of how, as a toddler, he hadn’t known the word for maple syrup and asked for it by pointing at the chicken and saying, “Any?”

“That’s cute,” Louis murmured, looking down and covering his face, while Harry’s heart thunked to the beat of the rain.

 

Sometimes the mornings stretched into afternoons, especially when it was wet, and they sat together on a wooden bench in front of the old fireplace built from stones. Teasing the fire with the iron poker made Harry feel like he knew what he was doing, even if the wilderness would likely swallow him up under other circumstances. Paper, then pine cones, then kindling, then logs.

“Do the logs actually burn?” Louis always asked. “It looks like the fire licks around them.”

“It burns where you can’t see,” Harry explained. “On the under side, lower to the coal.” He hunched down to demonstrate.

“This is so much cooler than the lame fireplace video my dad puts on the TV,” said Louis, scooting closer.

_It burns where you can’t see._

“Hey,” said Harry. He had an idea.

 

The small fire pit was the only real indication of where the wooden legs of the massive teepee were supposed to go, surrounded by a circle of smooth stones that had cradled cousins’ roasting sticks over the years as they talked into the night. But this year Harry specifically asked that the structure be built during a lull month, camp nearly deserted, relatives absent except for the occasional toddler splashing about the dock with plastic floaties.

Harry’s stepdad brought the beams out from the garage; and to everyone’s mild surprise, Louis’ father showed up on the pine path, flexing his elbows and asking to be involved. (It was later Harry learned that camping and making fires were considered “necessary skills” that had taken Louis far too long to learn, and his dad considered it an opportunity.)

They picked the perfect night. No rain.

Buoyantly hefting his sleeping bag and a sack of snacks after his parents were in bed, Harry thought to skip to the tent’s giant entrance and sashay under the canvas overhang like a football player careeing through his hometown corridor. But he stopped short when he saw Louis already there, sitting on his rolled-out sleeping bag and sifting through a camoflage backpack.

“Oh hey,” said Louis, still digging.

“Hi.” Harry shuffled through the tent flap and scooted up to the center pit, unpacking his sleeping bag in sudden silence and rolling it along one side, angled sharply towards the circle of stones. “Whatcha doing?”

Louis pulled a can out of the backpack, beaming. “Beer!”

Harry peered at the label. “It comes in cans?”

Louis rolled his eyes, pulling a few more cans from parts unknown. “S’all my dad ever drinks,” he said. “Fridge and pantry are full of it. He won’t even notice, I swear.”

“Okay,” said Harry, refusing to be the conscientious one who mused over the combination of booze and fire. He’d never really had a drink beyond sips at his parents’ dinner table. Had always been curious.

"You brought the fire stuff?”

Harry pointed to a side of the tent where wood was stacked in triangles, then hefted his snack bag. “Matches are in here.”

“I never learned how to build a fire,” said Louis, popping the cap off one of the beers. “Never needed to, I guess.” Resigned or melancholy or wistful, Harry couldn’t tell.

Harry took a beer when Louis held it out to him, feeling dangerous.

They built the fire before drinking much of the beer, luckily, though Louis spilled a bit on the pine cones and they took longer to catch than usual. Louis claimed he didn’t like graham crackers (Harry tried to avoid judgment because it was _Louis_ , but what the hell?), so Harry showed him how to tuck a piece of chocolate into the marshmallow itself so they whole thing melted together over the fire. Louis called him a genius. Harry blushed and bent his neck at an awkward angle.

He wasn’t sure how he had imagined a drunken buzz would feel, but it couldn’t have been close to this, Harry was sure. They’d had three cans each—maybe more like two and a half with all the spills—and Harry still felt entirely like himself. It was like he was _more_ himself. Exuberantly, outrageously himself, pawing closer to Louis with every gesture and grinning, cheeks red and tingly.

Their chins were covered in marshmallow when Harry’s self finally overtook his own sense of embarrassment. “I want to kiss somebody,” he said, lolling back into the canvas and nearly hitting his head on a wooden beam.

“Who?” asked Louis.

“Anyone,” Harry bluffed, though it was partially true.

Louis wiped his fingers off on the mossy ground. “You never have?”

Now Harry felt pathetic. And the beer wasn’t there to give him a boost—no, it _amplified_ the pathetic like a repeater and caused his shoulders to hunch a little in shame.

“It’s fine,” said Louis, moving closer, ignoring rogue flames. “It’s not that great.”

Harry raised his eyebrows.

“It’s kind of boring, really,” Louis continued.

Harry coughed. “Maybe you aren’t kissing the right people.”

Louis laughed at that, eyes crinkling. “And who are the right people, Haz?”

 _Not girls,_ Harry thought, but instead he blurted, “Me.”

Louis blinked.

“Oh god,” said Harry immediately, “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. I didn’t mean—”

Then Louis just leaned over and kissed him.

It was close enough to feel natural. It felt like lake water, lilies, sea grass—not the sting or rush Harry might have expected. It was more like cool mud, like the dredges of old lake muck caressing his toes. Some hated the muck, avoided it religiously; but to Harry it meant the lake was his. That the lake was home.

Of course, Harry talked a big game, but he didn’t know the half of what he was doing, beer or no. Still, he tried to mimic what he’d seen in movies—a slow burn, holding back a bit, waiting for response. No tongue. Too scared.

It must have been the right thing because Louis kept on kissing him, humming under his breath, raising one hand to move a stray curl behind Harry’s ear.

When they pulled apart it was because the unspoken lapse in caution had lasted long enough.

Harry grinned, leaned forward one last time and met Louis’ eyelid where a stray marshmallow bit clung to his eyelash, then stood up and said, “See? I’m clearly superior.”

It was time to smother the fire, and he didn’t dare look back at Louis’ face. As Harry rushed outside to wet a towel in the lake, he could feel his trembling legs betraying his cocky speech with a _hah_ , then an _oh my god, oh my god_ as he skipped across the sand to the water reflecting stars, velvety sky reassuring him and shaking his nervous hand.


	7. Secrets

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "It occurred to him while he and Louis were tepidly eating ginger cookies shaped like windmills: Louis had reason to be scared, and Harry didn’t believe in silence for its own sake."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> La la la, here we are again. I can't believe it's May and this isn't done yet. I go to Otsego in August. Maybe that'll be what it takes.
> 
> I have no idea what to say. Er. Pixie haircut Harry Styles makes me happy?
> 
> Thanks for still reading even though it's taking me forever.

_It’s been minutes, it’s been days_  
_It’s been all I remember_  
_Happy lost in your hair_  
_And the cold side of the pillow_  


 

Mornings, Harry found, defined his world more than any other moment. The latent light, wherever it came from, massaging his eyes; the sounds of birds (or sirens, back home) tickling him awake; the smells prodding him in the ribs like blades of grass. At the lake, he was accustomed to waking awkwardly alone, usually against the wall of the back cabin bedroom, caught between avoiding his own come and kicking some spider out of its web. Smelling wood and sweat.

That morning, Harry smelled ashes and sugar, turning in his half sleep and expecting a wall but finding his nose against Louis’ scalp. Harry inadvertently inhaled and had strands caught in his nostrils — scents of cheap shampoo, of stone, soot, heavy fire.

Harry lay where he was as long as he was able, willing his limbs to stillness. But his pulse picked up with every controlled breath, chills like a fever pulling him into the ground, and then, of course, he breathed too hard, and Louis’ eyes fluttered.

“Morning,” Louis yawned, wiping a hand across his face.

“Morning,” said Harry, reluctantly pulling away.

It ended like any sleepover: stuffing sleeping bags into their tiny sacks as well as they could, pulling on clean shirts, picking up debris and beer cans in the fear of getting caught.

“Hey,” said Louis, stuffing his sleeping bag, swinging at its folds like a boxer. “You know. What we did last night.”

Harry, on his knees collecting the last of the stray fire pieces, awkwardly toppled over onto the moss and rolled into a sitting position. “Yeah?”

“Can we…” _Do it again? Preferrably all the time?_ “Can we not… tell anybody about it?”

Oh. “Uh,” said Harry, a sinking hole in his stomach. He forced the words forward. “Yeah, I mean. That’s fine. I won’t tell.”

Louis looked relieved, and Harry tried to focus on that look while they packed up instead of his previous excitement about going running into his mom’s bedroom exclaiming how he had actually _kissed_ a _boy_. Scratch that.

After Louis left the teepee Harry pulled up tufts of moss with his fingernails until they burned.

 

It didn’t take long for Harry to say something. It occurred to him while he and Louis were tepidly eating ginger cookies shaped like windmills: Louis had reason to be scared, and Harry didn’t believe in silence for its own sake.

 

There was a room, across camp in the big cabin where Harry’s cousins stayed, that remained empty every summer. It was upstairs, past the rickety bathroom and past the yellow bedroom with bunk beds where siblings spat at each other over the railings. It was technically the “guest room”, but nobody ever seemed to stay there.

Maybe it was the strange candy-striped pink bedsheets that likely hadn’t been changed since 1975. Or the peculiar bed arrangement — two singles, perpendicular, each below a window, stuck fast to the sill like the slightest scoot inward might spell disaster. Or maybe it was because it was the last room on the right, the furthest from the stairs and bustle, the one that was almost _meant_ to be ignored like a student who hunched down to their desk when the teacher called for answers.

Perhaps for that reason, it was a prime makeout spot. Harry was quite sure that at least one of his cousins had lost their virginity in that room.

He dragged Louis there one night after supper and after a game of “Jenkins says” while his aunts and uncles were still doing the dishes and blueberry pie seeds were still stuck between everyone’s teeth.

“C’mon,” said Harry. “Want to show you something.”

And Harry _did_ want to see something — maybe something Louis hadn’t shown him yet, something he’d barely acknowledged himself.

They pulled themselves into the strange, small room, somehow darker than the rest of the house and yet lit by a sense of not-allowed. Harry pushed Louis down onto one of the single beds and sat across from him, crossing his ankles and breathing a bit, sorting through words.

“What is it?” Louis was looking around nervously like everyone did the first time they were in that room — like it could come open and claim you, swallow you whole like a Willy Wonka chocolate ride.

“Look at me, Lou.”

Harry half expected Louis to look at the floor or stare out the window or stand up and stalk out the shapeless wooden door, but when had Louis ever done what he expected?

“Lou,” he said, holding his eyes. “Something’s wrong. Tell me.”

Louis’ eyes widened, and he stuttered, which was new. So easily smooth, most of the time. “N-nothing. I mean.” He swallowed. “Is this about the tent? The teepee?” Another pause. “Are you mad?”

 _Mad_. It was so utterly ridiculous Harry wanted to laugh, but he didn’t. He dug his toes into the ugly woven carpet instead. “Lou,” he said carefully. “What scares you?”

“Not you,” said Louis. “Other things.”

“Things?”

“A few months ago,” Louis began, as if reciting dictation to a college professor. “A few months ago at home, I talked about a boy. Just someone at school, someone who could help me with work. I’d had girls in my room plenty of times. It was pretty much the same. But my dad, he…”

Harry held his breath, trying not to be jealous of these faceless people in Louis’ other life. His _home_.

“My dad didn’t think it was the same. He said some things. Called the boy names. Made it clear I wasn’t allowed to be… _that_.”

Such quiet, then. Pauses in speech only marked by the wind.

“But that’s at _home_ , Harry — it’s not here. It’s different here. It’s different with _you_. You told me it could be different, or better. And I don’t believe anyone, but I believe you.”

Harry unlatched himself from the strange pink comforter as if it had been keeping him prisoner, stumbled across the ugly rug like a vault of fire in a kid’s game (what would _you_ do to cross the lava?), and threw his arms around Louis, finally understanding the sanctity of this. The safety of the lake space.

“It’s so easy with you,” Louis mumbled onto his collarbones. “I want to stay here all the time and never go back.”

Just lean in, and.

But not in this room.

Harry kissed the corner of Louis’ mouth softly as he came up from the embrace and promptly stood, finally ready to face the fire downstairs. He took Louis’ hand.

Harry’s relatives let Louis take the leftover blueberry pie home. Louis gave a grin that perfectly matched the last cresent of it. “Thank you,” he whispered, to everyone, but looking at Harry like he was telling a secret.

 

If Harry expected things to get weird, or cautious, or worse — _polite_ , he was gratefully wrong. As long as there were adults around, he and Louis acted like they always had — maybe with some hesitation in their faces, circling like gladiators at times, knowing what could be happening but holding off for the sake of — something. Excitement? Suspense? Keeping the secret?

Harry wasn’t stupid, see. He wasn’t on some wild crusade to save Louis and ride him off into the sunset on a white steed. He understood the need for tiptoe, for hesitation, because even if his mom had always been wonderful (“Ah, young love,” she always said), Harry understood that he was very lucky to be allowed to paw at her sweaters and whine softly about the soft, compact, lovely boy down the path. He recognized that the comfort he felt could not possibly be universal, and some people needed their secrets.

Still, it made him sad.

One windy day he was eating brunch on the patio of his grandparents’ house, poking at his eggs, smiling at everyone and trying to be fully present when Louis emerged from the trees, trundling along the path, kicking at pine cones and holding his arms around his middle protectively. And something occurred to him.

Harry stood up, almost knocking over the strawberries. “Lou!” he beckoned.

Louis smiled as he avoided sharp tufts of weeds, hopping over stones, looking at the ivy bed like it was a great, rolling sea. Harry met him halfway down the stepping stones, taking his hand and pulling him past it, nodding at his grandparents and mother and stepfather and opening the door closest to the patio, dodgy knob and all, sliding the mirror-door aside and—

“What are we doing?”

—ruffling through the ancient closet to find the school sweaters his parents and grandparents and great uncles and aunts had worn with pride at some point far before he and Louis had even been born.

“Haz…”

“Here!” Harry exclaimed, like a grandma with bingo. “Here it is!”

“What—”

Harry enveloped Louis with an old sweater smelling of mothballs, wrapping him in it, slipping the wide neck opening over Louis’s tiny head and pulling down until the gold “C” stretched regally over his… well, his hips.

“Too big,” said Louis, embarrassed.

“Hey,” said Harry, unsure of his words for a moment, faltering before the massive history of one garment. “It looks nice.”

He grabbed the big sleeves of the old sweater that extended past Louis’ fingers and wrapped them around himself as well, hiding them both away until his parents called him to clear the table.

When Louis left wearing the sweater, big gold initial wrapping him up in sturdy wool, Harry felt better about their secret, somehow, like the ancient sweater could protect them with its musty, moth-eaten strength.


	8. Still

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Waiting and feeling and waiting some more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At long last!
> 
> I'm actually going to finish this about a year after I started it, while on vacation at the lake. The one in the story, that is.
> 
> I love the word "still". It means so many things.

_Long days are almost here_  
_Faded signs for you_  
_I'll be waiting all day_  
_I've been waiting all year_  
_For you_  


 

Harry had never kept a secret for so long, see.

A few weeks was one thing — smiling at his mother in silence, shaking his head at summer aunts and uncles who asked about girlfriends (that was easier, of course, due to semantics). But then he went home, and nine months almost broke him.

Like the lake meant nothing in the face of regularity. Like the school’s very halls and tiles were judging his changed countenance. Like the fluorescent bathroom lights, discolored plaster, and cracking asphalt could usurp gentle laps of shore water, like the absolutely military clips of obligation could really overtake the smell of pines, of comfortable secrecy, or of Louis.

 

Driving back up, though, Harry found that he didn’t blame anyone, didn’t resent the situation, didn’t even wish he’d had a fake girlfriend to get him through the social pressure of hooking up or making out. He just stared out the windows of his mom’s station wagon, counting the close trees as they zipped past, waiting to breathe again.

 

Familiar turns took the car over the long driveway, crunching ferns and navigating roots before finally emerging into sand and moss and waves waiting to make history. It was late, of course, too late to see Louis, although when his parents — two of them, now — shuffled into the cabin like spies and urged him past the game closet curtain, they nodded and grinned and held fast to each other like a couple of overjoyed larks. Like they knew his heart. _Oh god._ Harry wanted to sink into the floorboards but settled for smiling, shrugging, and stumbling backwards into the small room; shutting the door and falling guiltily between the moth-eaten pillows, suddenly horny like the lake smell was what set him off, or the knowledge that Louis was likely lying in bed a few houses down also thinking about Harry’s arrival and clutching a pillow between his thighs.

Harry couldn’t sleep that night, and wasn’t proud of it, but reluctantly kept awake at the hope that someone might make the midnight trek down the path and rap at his open window, whispering _hey. Harry. Wake up. S'your secret._

As restless as he was, Harry managed to stay in bed until dawn, when he crawled wrapped in a wool blanket from the bedroom and sat on the window seat, watching sun filter over the water. The massive picture window magnified the importance of everything like an HD TV screen, and Harry could often pretend he was watching something live, like a nature show or a gardening special, or just the deliberate dawn.

The only thing that ever interrupted his reverie was a curiously shaped hole in the glass, funneled inward like a sand trap from the inside but smooth on the outside like a drill pocket. It fucked with his mental symmetry. Supposedly one of his ancestors had shot a BB gun from the porch and it was a miracle nobody was killed.

Still, it helped Harry keep his head during these white-light mornings that edged on the side of dreams, reminded him of physical space.

 

The later morning brought chickadees and bluejays and motorboats and lapping waves and musty wood and coffee and smiles and a quiet journey across pine needles to _make sure_ Louis was there (of course he was), in case their secret had Louis avoiding him or something equally devastating—

Of course Louis was there, on the green tended lawn outside his huge white lake house, inspecting the side of it while his father peered over his shoulder. Harry had no idea what they were doing but decided it didn’t matter, tiptoeing until he was right behind them and planning to surprise Louis but getting a faceful of chin hairs from Louis’ father instead.

“What do you want?” he asked abruptly. Harry thought it was the most he’d ever said to him, and was glad of it.

Then Louis turned around and Harry forgot about everything else. It was crazy what nine months could do, how Louis looked different but exactly the same, how his hair was longer but he didn’t have a tan yet and his shoulders were broader—

Harry’s thoughts were cut short as he handled being on the receiving end of a tight hug. “Hi,” Louis was saying, musically. “ _Hi_.”

It seemed they held on forever, but Louis’ dad was still watching, so they pulled back but Harry had to put his hand on Louis’ cheek before hesitating. Their shudders and smiles were all that stretched past formality, for now.

“Going to hang out with Harry,” Louis said, more confident than Harry had ever seen him, and it had him wondering when _going to play_ had changed to _going to hang out_. “We can finish looking later?”

“Looking for what?” Harry asked at the same time that Louis’ father said “Fine,” and they both went hop-skipping in the direction of the thick trees, Harry trying his best to stay behind.

Except that nine months of a secret had caught up to him, and by the time they arrived, flushed, at the no-man’s-land that was the back of Harry’s cabin, he didn’t want to wait and pulled Louis behind the drying towels on the clothes line before kissing him, digging his heels into the soft moss. The towels on the line had tacky neon patterns and hid them, but only just. Louis’ shoes pointed into the dirt while he stood tiptoe, trying to catch up to his lips while Harry was ready to push over the trees.

 

About an hour from the lake was a bigger lake, big enough to be an ocean, or at least act like one. In one direction were the sand dunes and a rocky beach folded around a stagnant nautical museum; in the other were the means to an island. It was an island where cars were not allowed; you had to take a ferry, and when Harry held Louis’ hand across the aisle from his mum and dad (no more steps necessary), they didn’t flinch.

It was an island overgrown with tourism that still managed to retain its mythical properties like an ancient talisman in the hands of a real estate agent. It was an island that maintained its dignity through every new decade of technology. Harry might have called it brave, except that there seemed to be forts all over the place. Historical forts, battlegrounds, old stone walls that had soldered soldiers into their older years. When he was younger, Harry had always been impressed by them. Now it felt more like part of the land had been thirsting for a legacy and settled, eventually, upon sanctioned violence.

Still, the rocky shores were clean and welcoming. Still, blankets held their bodies while Harry’s mom and dad went for walks. Still, spontaneous picnics upon the stones seemed to grace the ground with something not quite prepared for war — gracing the senses instead, clasping his and Louis’ hands as they took advantage of their distance from the world. If the regular lake was removed, this was in outer space. If the little lake melted awkwardness away, this big one barely acknowledged it. The sun was always in their faces and the loose dirt was always underfoot, dependably, like a set of warm hands.

 

As much as a tiny island could be famous for anything, this one was famous for fudge.

It came in great blocks like masonic bricks from the Middle East — restituted and firmly formed and so goddamn cocky in their sugary magnitude. There must have been many stores that sold it, but Harry always went to the one, ignoring keychains and magnets and ducking past tall shelves boasting ornate mugs and ceramic animals to land definitively in front of a glass counter, samples on display pushed forward like team hopefuls desperate to be picked.

“Um,” said Harry, upon viewing the selections behind the vast glass. Louis and Harry’s mom and dad had been distracted by seagulls pecking at the dirt outside. He had very little time.

“Help you?” asked a lovely girl likely far too young to be behind a counter such as this.

“Hi,” said Harry, letting a breath escape. “I’m looking for something… peanut buttery.” Louis was obsessed with peanut butter. He used it in fish bait, scavenger hunts, dinner, cookouts, anything he could.

“Well, there’s the regular peanut butter fudge. There’s also chocolate peanut butter, peanut butter and jelly, peanut butter toffee, peanut butter marshmallow—”

“That one,” said Harry. “Please? A quarter pound.”

“Quarter pound of peanut butter marshmallow… fifteen.”

After Harry paid they placed the fudge into a white bag with what the girl called a “fudge window” which was really just see-through wax paper in a viewing square, and he thanked them and wound his way to the shop corner where there were cheesy wooden carvings to distract him until someone came inside to fetch him. But he knew they had reservations at a nice restaurant, and eventually he turned around to the tall shelves of souvenirs, clutching the bag of fudge in one hand and finding a path past the awkwardly placed “artifacts” — when did he become too aware to enjoy these things? A while, he supposed. Earned awareness.

Irony struck as Harry pillowed straight into another person coming the opposite way. “Sorry,” he said automatically.

It was Louis.

“Oh,” said Harry. “So we’re leaving for the restaurant, yeah? I was just—”

Louis was holding a bag with a wax fudge window. “Um,” he said.

Harry stared for a moment, absorbing the reflection of his own gesture.

"It’s for you,” said Louis. “Chocolate mint.” Harry’s favorite.

A wide smile stretching firmly over his teeth, Harry held up his own bag, and Louis’ eyes widened in delight. “Peanut butter marshmallow,” Harry said. “For you.”

They stood facing each other for several more seconds, holding up their bags, smiling sheepishly. Something surged through Harry’s chest, and it felt a little like love.

           

At the end of that summer they were sitting on the red sailboat moored next to the metal dock, intermittently sloshing water over it. The red paint had long faded, but getting it wet gave the illusion of a fresh coat, and if they were fast enough they could wet the whole boat before the far ends started to dry.

But that day they were in no hurry. Splashing an ankle’s worth of water against Harry, Louis said, “I think you were right.”

Harry turned his head a little. “About what?”

“Everything,” said Louis, giving a deep breath, squinting into the setting sun, and Harry smiled, content.

It was the summer before everything changed.


	9. Stars

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Harry soon discovered that unlike people he’d read about or listened to, he didn’t experience sex or pleasure in terms of one body part going into another like a kind of pre-sanctioned anatomical playset."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this took forever, and I'm sorry. (Sex scenes are intimidating.)
> 
> I'm also sorry for how I've left it. But it gets fixed. I promise.
> 
> Almost there.
> 
> ::flees::

_I want you underneath me_  
_Holding on to my shoulder_  
_And I am carving out my territory_  
_With a bullet in my heart_

 

Sixteen and the years were coming faster and faster, collapsing upon each other like waves at the shore, but for the summer Harry found that he and Louis often eschewed activities for simple slowness. Lying on the lake ensconced in plastic, passed out in the hammock, sitting in lawn chairs old and creaky enough to fall completely backwards and send them into the lumps of grass — all of these things happened more and more often. Harry moved more slowly in Louis’s presence, languishing, as if to make the days last longer.

The thing is, they never did. Harry's cousins might suggest a game of croquet or boules or even ping pong on the uneven painted slab of wood that came off the roof, but he’d find himself declining more and more often, eager to remain still. Trying to stop time.

And that wouldn’t do. What set this place apart wasn't the solace. What kept him (and Louis) here was the lake, the perspective, the perfection that seemed to manifest itself underneath them without even trying. And he'd stopped trying.

 

The old tennis court was now so overgrown with moss and fungi that no one ever played on it anymore, so Harry used it for a quiet spot, his back against the backboard, feet digging in search of asphalt or of some other time. There weren’t many private places around, which didn’t used to matter, but now it gnawed at Harry the more he couldn’t have anything to himself.

As if it were a brand new idea and not some teenaged tradition from old movies, Harry felt giddy when he picked up a sharp stick and started scratching letters into the softer moss, avoiding heart shapes but unable to avoid adding a flourish to each of their initials, side by side. “There,” he murmured upon finishing.

Something suggested they be more permanent.

 

On the far wall of Harry’s cabin was a chart, penciled and painted, notched each year to mark his ancestors’ heights. Harry himself had a line, blue and traced from when he first could stand up on his own to last year’s growth spurt. (He suspected he might end up taller than Louis, but dared not speak about such things.) “ _Harry :)_ ” read the line, in smooth increments from year to year, accompanied sideways by parents and grandparents and great aunts back to 1936.

Louis ran his fingers along the wall’s ridges with reverence, tracing each year from left to right, deftly finding the proper trajectory. “You shot up like a weed,” he muttered, smiling at the great leaps in height when Harry had been a toddler. “Why are you showing this to me?”

“You’re going on it,” said Harry.

“No, Harry, c’mon, it’s _your_ family—”

Harry pulled the couch away from the wall and grabbed an old copy of _Robinson Crusoe_ from the bookshelf before thinking better of it and grabbing an ancient leatherbound brick called _Cannibal Land_. He beckoned to Louis with it.

“Shouldn’t it be bad luck to measure people’s height with a book about cannibals?”

“Nah,” said Harry. “S’tradition.”

“So weird.” But Louis slid over, put his heels against the wall and stretched his neck, suggesting to Harry once again that _weird_ could be a good thing.

Harry made a pencil mark. “Your turn,” he said, showing Louis how to flatten the book against his head.

When they stepped away there were two pencil marks side by side, almost the same distance from the floor. Harry wrote their names: _Harry_ , a continuation of his own single blue line from years past, and a single little _Louis :)_ right beside it.

 

They cooked out for dinner one night, Louis inviting Harry and his mum and dad and a few straggling cousins for blackened hot dogs and baked beans. Louis’ father brought out metal roasting wands that extended — much fancier than the green branches Harry had always used. During the s’mores course Harry sat next to Louis, even fed him marshmallows a few times, while Louis’ father slurped beer on a lawn chair and didn’t try to interfere. Maybe the number of people diffused his attitude. Harry even had the thought that they might be home free.

Dusk was a long time coming. Harry was antsy about it because they were going stargazing on Louis’ dock, just the two of them, and Harry had a book of constellations and towels and a box of Cheez-Its and a brain full of things to say about the Big and Little Dipper.

Dark was a long time coming, too. All the adults went to bed drunk.

Louis’ dock was just like Harry’s: a straight shot of planks to thigh-deep water, no perpendicular pieces or fancy mooring, just enough surface to excuse the proximity required to see stars.

It was going to be perfect. The one terry towel with pillows, the snacks, the plastic bottles with beer in them, the silent shore. And Harry was just about to lie down when he felt a drop.

He tried to ignore it. The thick clouds above were moving quickly, could surely pass by in time to—

“Whoop,” said Louis. “I felt a drop.”

“It’ll blow over,” said Harry desperately, then felt another, unmistakable.

“Here we go,” said Louis, looking skyward as the drops increased, and Harry was distraught.

“Stop,” he tried, like a weather-wielding god might hear him. “Just _… stop.”_

The sky’s response was simultaneously hilarious and painful: it opened fire upon boy and boy and food and bedding, cascading down defiantly, drenching them.

“C’mon!” Louis was yelling, grabbing the pillows and towel like they were refugees. “My house. Come on!”

Soaked accessories were left on the porch as they flung themselves inside, quietly frantic (“Don’t wake up my dad,” Louis fervently said) and searching for stairs, taking them two at a time as if the rain had come in after them and pursued at their heels like a monster.

Turns and turns made Harry realize how little time he’d actually spent in Louis’ lake house beyond awkward permissions and circumstantial film viewings. Because of a father? Or unfamiliarity? But that father was fast asleep, and nothing seemed more familiar or welcoming than Louis’ path to safety.

Upon the right room the door flung open, closed, and clicked — but did not lock.

Heavy breathing. A moment passed, and Harry suddenly felt his disappointment.

“Sorry,” Harry mumbled, more to himself than to anyone else. “That sucked. Sorry we can’t — ugh.”

“It’s okay,” said Louis, and for some reason his resignation infuriated Harry, set him off.

“It’s not _okay_ ,” he snapped, grabbing a long strand of his hair and squeezing it. Water droplets roped past them both and ended with a splatter. “We _planned_ to—”

“Harry.” Louis’ hands were against Harry’s chest suddenly, calming, and Harry _wanted_ to be calm, but the storm wound him up to a point that his insides seemed to connect directly to the sky.

“It’s not fair,” he moaned uselessly, like they were ten again and their parents had told them to go inside for quiet time. “It was supposed to be perfect.”

“Plans aren’t always perfect, Haz,” said Louis, shrugging.

“But they always have been, here,” said Harry desperately. “It’s like I never had to try; there were always things like the dunes and the island and across the lake and horseshoes in the dumb sand and now it just feels like—” _Like I’ve run out of ways to keep you around._

“But we don’t have to do anything,” insisted Louis, and it was so logical Harry wanted to cry.

“We do,” said Harry, “we always do. There are things we do here I can’t do anywhere else.” He swallowed and clasped Louis’ hands, which had migrated to Harry’s shoulders. “I don’t want this to turn into just another _place_ , like school, or the grocery store, or the park or anything like that. It’s more than that. It’s _better_ than that.” He took a breath, already chilled from being wet in the dark house. They were both drenched. The Cheez-Its and constellation book had made it safely inside under the towels, but remained downstairs.

Louis dropped his head between them, balancing his weight by clutching Harry’s shoulder’s more tightly and squeezing. “This isn’t like anywhere else,” he said, perhaps a little too quietly.

“Right. Because of the beach, and the owls and the _water_ —”

“No,” Louis interrupted. “It’s not _any_ of those things.” Louis looked up, and though it was dark, Harry thought he could see the lake behind his eyes. “Harry. I love this place, and I love all the random shit we do. I love the woods and the old smells and the acorns stabbing me in the feet. But what makes it all perfect is you.”

Harry couldn’t help it—he stepped back, accommodating the words. “What?”

“Before you, this place was a leftover obligation from my dad’s ex-wife’s family. It was a house somewhere else, sure, but still just a house. It was expensive and boring and an excuse my dad used to brag and feel rich. The lake was there, and so was everything else, but…” Louis shook his head. “I said last year that you were right about everything. I guess I misspoke. If you think I keep coming here because of traditions and cookouts and old stories, you’re wrong. Because those things are nice. But I come every year to see you.”

Harry’s breathing was suddenly erratic and he couldn’t blame it on being wet and cold. Something dull and overwhelming pressed behind the bridge of his nose. “I just… I wait _all year_ ,” he gasped, struggling to get the words out. “I wait and get through the stupid shit and boring regular days just to be here, with you, and I want to make it _perfect_ enough—”

“It’s perfect enough,” Louis said, and cut him off with a kiss.

They were very wet and their shoes squelched against the floor, but the meeting of their mouths made a noise to rival it, tongues suddenly involved (like leveling up in a video game, Harry thought) and causing a suction strong enough to weaken his knees.

He righted himself shortly, leaning up and bringing his hands to Louis’ cheeks, causing a similar reaction in Louis, who broke off long enough to mumble “Love your dimple, god, just want to live in it,” which set Harry off giggling; and well, that wouldn’t work, because it was impossible to kiss and smile at the same time. “Stop,” Harry said, putting his nose against Louis’ neck. “Stop talking, you’ll make me—”

“Smile? Blush? Come? Because all of those are favorable options,” Louis muttered, breathing into Harry’s hair.

Harry whimpered, wondering how they’d gotten here so fast, at first — then reminding himself that they’d known each other over six years and after all the days he’d spent pining he should be commended for not exploding into a burst of teenage hormones before now.

Luckily, wet clothes made for a natural progression of taking them off. Harry lifted his arms, then waited for Louis to do the same, giving a tangible goal to undressing that Harry had never experienced. His own body, all dips and bulges and love handles, would be exposed to be admired rather than scrutinized. It was heady and lovely and Harry could hardly stand it, rushing forward to run his hands up and down Louis’ torso. “You’re so lovely,” he said, kissing down to handy collar bones. “Want you all the time.”

“Me too,” said Louis. “Needed you to show me—”

“Shhh,” tried Harry, “let—”

Before he knew what was happening, his hands had breached the waistband of Louis’ wet pants. And gods bless the rain, because even if it had ruined their stargazing, it caused fabric to glide over skin like it was made to be malleable under his fingers. Harry slipped down, and down, and when faced with a barrier between his mouth and the subject of his adolescent fantasies for however many years, he didn’t hesitate before pulling down one last time and dropping enthusiastically to his knees.

“ _Shit_ ,” Louis quipped.

Harry didn’t respond because he had his mouth full, but he’d admittedly watched a lot of porn just like regular people his age. Or maybe most of them didn’t, maybe they fumbled through their first times too bowled over (as Harry admittedly was) by live flesh, by the pulsing skin beneath his mouth, under his tongue, solid and perfect and raw.

“Harry,” Louis seemed to whisper, but the name was broken up by errant thunder, by the shakes and knocks upon the skylight glass, by drops upon the windows. And though it tried to drown them out, at one point Louis lifted Harry to his feet, out of his reverie, and dragged him to the bed, clutching his hips like a lifeline and forcing him to fall forwards — vulnerable, exposed except for his wet underwear which was probably giving him a rash at this point with all the frantic movement that was occurring.

“I actually,” Louis was saying, moving against him and breathing like he’d been doing flips underwater, “I’m actually really happy that it rained.”

By this point Harry had wriggled out of his wet pants, and he dug a grin into Louis’ neck like a loon from the lake with something silver in its mouth — an unmentionable success.

Harry soon discovered that unlike people he’d read about or listened to, he didn’t experience sex or pleasure in terms of one body part going into another like a kind of pre-sanctioned anatomical playset. Of course they were naked now, and of course skin-to-skin was the goal, but to him it seemed to be all about touching Louis anywhere he could, running his hands up and down goosebumped thighs, biting at sharp bones and pinching at spare flesh to flag where he’d been. It was about shoving his hips forward as if the other pair waiting there might falter or disappear, then signing in relief when those very hips pushed back. It was about acknowledging that circumstances were limited and there would be no innovative positioning or prepared comfort. It was about breathing in time to involuntary thrusts, trying to find another point of entry but still shuddering while the rain pounded on the overhead skylight overhead as if to remind them of its pivotal role in all of this.

Breaths came faster when Harry’s fingers finally found that spot, pushing and pushing and breaching and suddenly catching come in his mouth — it was salty, like popcorn — and wiping a finger over his lips. Of course it took little effort to get there himself; just more pushing and messy kissing and the latent realization that this kind of friction worked much better against someone else’s waiting skin than his own cold sheets.

Even if he wanted to stay awake afterwards, the idea was useless. He adored Louis, of course, and wanted to say so, but then they clenched their joints together like crabs, and how could he undermine such a moment with simple words?

A few hours later they woke up and did it all again, with their hands this time. Harry savored the sharp burn of calloused knuckles beneath his hips, and when he came while lying sideways in a bed, Louis didn’t crowd him towards the back wall in shame but wrapped him in a clean sheet from the cupboard, whispering that they’d do laundry later, like these arms and hands were where he really belonged.

           

Mornings defined Harry’s world, and this one was perfect.

Haze climbed against the corner of his eye, and cool air grazed his bare back. His feet were burrowed against a pillow. Yet his chest, his stomach, ribcage, and entire front held fast against another’s skin that rose and fell like a live feed.

The rain had stopped. A glare was greeting them, more tepid than a storm but no less consequential. Harry curled further into the warmth beneath him, reluctant to even entertain the thought of waking. But as he moved, the muscles under him woke and rumbled, breathed in waves, spoke the smooth lines of another’s body.

Harry hefted himself forward to line up their torsos and smiled expectantly, his nose curling as he breathed through it.

Louis yawned and opened his eyes, smiling a bit when he saw Harry above him. A moment passed, lead-heavy, and seconds held their eyes. Then they said, simultaneously, “Hi.”

Harry couldn’t take the humor of it and dropped his head, burying his face into Louis’ neck and closing his eyes. He wasn’t used to waking up like this. It was all so bright here, white plaster reflecting the sun. He felt exposed.

Louis turned Harry’s chin and raised his head, something precious in his eyes.

“Hey,” Harry said again, and he leaned down to kiss him, one hand wrapped in Louis’ hair and the other running up and down their thighs. He was happy enough to have half a thought that they go again. Then Louis turned his head toward the door.

“What,” said Harry thoughtlessly. But Louis’ expression had turned to fear, and a slow stick of dynamite lit itself in his gut.

Harry looked to the left, suddenly feeling like he might throw up.

They hadn’t locked the door. They had forgotten, and Louis’s father was standing right in front of it.

Harry swallowed, but his mouth was dry. For a split second his thought about explaining it away, but then it dawned on him that he was naked, Louis was naked, and circumstances were painfully obvious.

Louis shoved Harry aside and sat up short like he’d been shocked. “Dad,” he said, voice breaking.

Harry looked back and forth between the two of them. He needed an extra set of eyes, or a special pair that saw everything at once like the old owl at his grandparents’ house. Louis’ eyes were wide, and his father’s mouth was in a very, very straight line.

“Get. Out,” he said.

Harry didn’t understand at first; he panicked and scooted backwards, hitting the dresser.

“Get. OUT.” Louis’ father kept going. “GET _OUT!”_

Harry was terrified. He picked up his pants from the night before and pulled them on, not even glancing back before shoving past the door and careening down the staircase. He flew out the screen door clutching his shirt against his heart as if it to stop it from launching out of his chest.

He didn’t stop running until he’d reached his own cabin. He ignored the smell of breakfast and buried himself in his own back bedroom sleeping bag, ashamed and scared and hating himself for leaving Louis alone.

 

He woke in the afternoon half-curled, feeling almost relieved before the earlier morning came rushing back at him like a bad dream.

Too embarrassed to open the door and face his own parents, Harry removed the bug screen on one of the back windows and climbed out the cabin, landing on the dirt. The clammy air gave him a bit of confidence. It had been several hours; surely Louis was outside by now, or least allowed to be outside. He was strong willed. He’d have to be okay.

Harry's grandparents’ yard was quiet, and he was used to that. But beyond the pines and leaves the grass was still, and the Louis’ house seemed to hold itself together with whispers.

He trotted around the side of the house where he’d always found Louis looking for something, but it was just as quiet. The trampoline was where it had always been, unmoved, outside the garage, poised for play, but there was no one around, and—

The car was gone.

Maybe they’d gone into town, he tried to tell himself. Maybe they needed firewood or food…

“No,” Harry said, somehow knowing that wasn’t true. "No."

There was nothing to cushion his knees this time when he fell — just on gravel and rocks, signs of cities, of ghosts.

“Louis,” he said. "Louis." His voice was hoarse like he’d been screaming from hornet stings.

At some point he wandered back to the cabin. He didn’t realize he’d been crying until he kicked the back doorstop savagely and came face to face with his mum holding a block of cheese in her hand.

“Harry,” she said. “Oh, Harry.”

He burst into tears again. “He’s gone, mum,” he said. “He took him and they left, and he's gone.”

She hugged him hard and told him she loved him and it hurt a little less, for a while.

 

There wasn’t a day for the whole rest of the summer that Harry didn’t go through the trees and around Louis’ house to the driveway, in the ever-renewing hope that the car would come back.

But it didn’t.


	10. Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Louis squinted in the setting sun, eyes crinkling, and Harry was suddenly home."

_And you know_  
_You know I’m always coming back to this place_  
_And you know_  
_You know I’m always gonna look for your face_

 

The following school year was an especially long one.

He had Louis’ email address, which was the only suggestion he existed outside of summer; but he’d never used it. Every few weeks after stumbling home from some party he didn’t give a shit about, Harry would sit at his desk and stare a yellow Post-It note in some attempt to reconcile the email with endless summers. He would inevitably fail, turn off the light, and stare at his ceiling for a few hours, waiting for sleep.

And what could he say, really? Introduce himself as Louis’ “lake neighbor” and apologize for running out the morning after they’d had sex? Ask him how his normal life was? Tell him he thought he might love him and all the sharp locker edges and stained cement stairs of the city were like mazes, like pixels of obstacles in his way back to the lake — to reality?

Eventually when he was drunk one night Harry sent off a one-line email that said something like _Hey. It’s Harry. I’m really sorry about what happened._ And at some point that week he got an email back that just said _Thanks_.

It was the hardest nine months he’d even been through, even in the later years when he stopped going to the lake altogether.

 

That first summer back he and his parents went up like nothing had changed, arriving in the middle of the night and tiptoeing to sleep like the whole world held the same secret it always had. But Harry slept through the whole night as if distracted by the quiet, and when the morning fog stretched its fingers across the lake he stayed in bed, afraid of finding nothing or nobody to stay awake for.

He was right. Louis’ house stayed empty, and dark.

It took a week of Harry oversleeping and angrily kicking at the shore before his mum and dad agreed to leave.

 

The last time was Harry’s summer after his senior year. He’d finally graduated, and so many of his classmates were going on road trips, and he thought to invite several of them to the lake in an effort to make it special again. They were friends and helped to pass the time at first, but Harry only took them across the lake once and stalled before showing them how to make banners from birch bark, and when his cousins made a bonfire they didn’t even go — just sat on the sagging couch with their beers like they were too cool to enjoy anything.

Harry didn’t stay long that summer, either. He and his friends could only get drunk and high so many days in a row before it turned into emotional catatonia. They went off to school gushing about what a great trip it had been, and Harry didn’t have the heart to tell them otherwise.

He didn’t go back to the cabin for three years.

 

It got easier — some of it. Pretending that part of his life was over, like he’d grown out of it, moved on, gotten too busy to bother. All the things that had been incomprehensible to his younger self became the excuses he rattled off: too much going on, life got in the way, I want to see the rest of the world instead, (he didn’t). Eventually Harry’s parents stopped going to the lake themselves or asking him if he wanted to go. They started taking overseas holidays by themselves, and Harry didn’t fault them for it. He just sweated the summers out in his third floor bedroom watching films and getting high and doing stupid, useless shit with kids he met at university.

Harry got used to city sounds. Or he tried to. Because sometimes motorcycles sounded like motorboats and sometimes the hard wind sounded like the waves, but no matter how much he listened, there was nothing that ever sounded like Louis.

 

One morning a few months after getting his two-year degree Harry woke up sweat-tangled in his own bedsheets and heard his parents talking about selling the cabin.

His sheets were sticky, was the thing. He’d entertained a new friend all night in hopes of getting laid but had apparently misjudged the situation and made a move only to get smacked, so he’d ended up curled against the wall like so many nights at the lake, guiltily jerking himself off. It was better because at this point he’d given a few other hand jobs and knew what he was doing, but the mornings — so defining — remained disappointing, sweat taking him back until he was twelve again in a sleeping bag touching himself and being terrified.

“We never get up there, anymore. It’s a waste.”

“A waste of what? Property taxes?”

“Listen, I know you want what’s best for the family—”

“Please don’t condescend. Maybe we should ask Harry.”

“Harry hasn’t set foot in that place since he graduated high school! I think there might be… bad memories—”

“So you just want to sell it? After all the legacy, the history?”

"I just think it might be better financially—”

“To what?”

“To let it _go._ ”

Maybe it was the heat or the threat of losing his childhood or a latent bell that went off in his head, but Harry didn’t know what compelled him, after three years, to climb out of bed, grip the door frame in desperation, and say simply, "No."

Surprised owl eyes whipped to his face. “Oh. Harry. You’re up,” said his mum. “We were just—”

“Don’t sell it,” Harry said. “Don't. I’ll go.”

His father took a step up. “Go where?”

“The lake.” Harry fingered the hem of his t-shirt and pulled it down, suddenly determined. "I mean, the cabin's going to need work, right? I can do it. I could even get a job up there, or—”

“Honey,” said his mum, all love and concern in her voice. “It’s expensive. We wouldn’t expect you to — especially after what — ”

“It's not that,” he said. “I just... want to go. I don't do anything otherwise. I have a car, besides, and the place is probably a wreck.”

“But,” said his mum, trying again, “it’s been so long since—”

“Rats,” said his father, interrupting. “There are bound to be rats.”

“Yeah,” Harry said. “I know.”

“And bees.”

"Oh, I remember the bees," he said, lightly, and crashed into both of their arms simultaneously.

 

It took him a few days to fold his life into the back of a trunk. Harry just packed his entire room into an old sedan — sheets and books and folding table and game system,each balanced more precariously on top of the other until his mother was forced to shove the cooler with his lunch in it right next to the driver’s seat. She also slipped an envelope into his shirt pocket when they kissed goodbye. There was something knowing in her eyes.

When Harry stopped at a gas station later in the day, he checked the envelope. It had an awful lot of money in it and xeroxed copy of the lake property land survey and legal deed. There was a pink Post-It note on top in his mother’s handwriting that said "Think about it", and then, "Say hello to Louis. xxo"

 

The lake hadn’t changed, thankfully.

Of course, the cabin was crawling with mice. There was a hornet’s nest under the porch (which Harry left respectfully alone) and a rotting bit of roof that needed replacing. The plumbing had been fucked at some point and a day after Harry arrived he was boiling lake water for tea.

But the sand was there. When he got the wooden dock out of the garage, it held together. The same shore rocks were in place to break the waves. The trees looked a little older and the moss was a little browner, but that was all there, too.

A week went by and Harry felt better. He did his laundry in the little nearby town. He bought a new phone line and put surge protectors on all of the ancient two-pronged outlets. He hooked up his iPod to the old boom box radio and ran some extension cords behind the kitchen wall. It was thorough and modern and and Harry loved it, even if something was still missing.

 

There were no relatives around that year — not even in the Big House. They had grown up, had somehow put the lake cabin aside in their lives. And as much as Harry enjoyed the quiet, he found himself equally nostalgic for the screeching and laughing arpeggios on cement stairs and the neighboring dock — the nerves of settling into rubber ski shoes, the softness of the mud further out, the dead fish on shore, the grinning faces holding his small hands. 

All those lost summers.

He made hot dogs one night on a whim, even if he could only eat two of them himself and the very thought of s’mores made him want to puke. The sun was resting on the state park treetops a mile across the waves. A daring chipmunk was darting in and out of the legs of his lawn chair, searching for bun crumbs. Harry stood up and stretched, feeling too tall for where he was. How long had it really been? He curled his lengthy frame down.

He could only imagine how pathetic he looked: slumped and shriveled against a sunset, staring at his childhood lake like it could rewrite his life. Because nothing had moved. It all stood still, and he was out of place — like the world wasn’t as big as it had been.

“Harry?”

He turned around, half expecting to see some forgotten uncle holding a beer.

What he saw was a young man in sweats and a t-shirt, curling his fingers together, glancing up and back down at the ground as if he weren’t sure what was real and what wasn’t.

“Louis?”

Facial hair dusted the man’s chin like powder gold, and he hadn’t really grown but _sharpened_ : bones poked out of his chest like stalwart buoys; tendons pulled across his neck like ropes; his cheeks were paddle blades and when his lip curled upwards Harry thought he might be able to catch a hook in it.

“Louis?” he said again. He tried to step forward but his leg caught on the lawn chair and he tilted awkwardly before catching himself. “Oops,” he said.

“Hi,” said Louis, or what Harry could only think of as New-Louis. “You’re here.”

“Yeah,” said Harry, stupidly. “So are you?”

It was a question, of sorts, but then they both said “What” at the same time before pulling back to look down and find something to scratch for distraction. The swaying waves seemed to shush them.

Harry tried again. “You’re — you're staying at the house?”

New-Louis nodded.

“But how? Your dad—”

New-Louis shook his head. “He's dead,” he said. “Going on six months. Cancer.”

“Oh,” said Harry. “Oh, I’m… sorry.”

New-Louis raised his eyebrows.

"Or,” Harry tried, “not sorry exactly, but… crap. I don’t even know.”

New-Louis looked serious for a moment before shrugging. “I don’t even know, myself. I miss him and then I don’t. Or maybe I miss the idea of him. It’s hard to say.”

“I’m sorry.”

New-Louis stepped forward, shoving him in protest, and in that one gesture suddenly becoming the Louis he’d always known. “Stop,” he said. “It's not why I'm here. Death is all formal and weird. Nobody liked him anyway." Then more softly, "Least of all you."

“Still.” It was death, after all. Harry wasn’t sure who deserved it. Even the one who’d taken Louis away.

“Nobody knew he even _had_ this place,” Louis was saying now. “Left it out of his will and everything.”

“But you’re here. Does that mean…”

“I don’t know." Louis turned to the side in hesitation. “I _think_ so? There’s still like, legal bullshit going on, but…”

“But you’re here.”

Harry couldn't help it. He was smiling, now. Smiling in the face of death. And it didn’t matter, he decided, how he felt or what moral compass he was violating. He’d had enough of guilt.

“I fixed up the cabin,” he blurted. “I mean, it’s like, livable. All the time. All year. And my parents gave me the deed and I took it as a hint and I thought I might just, you know…”

"Stay?” Louis finished.

“Yeah,” said Harry, stepping forward again, staying stable this time. “Stay.”

"That's great."

“Louis,” Harry tried, “why don't you—”

“Stop—”

“I know it wasn’t your fault—”

“He wouldn’t let me—”

“I would have—”

“I know you would have—"

“Okay,” said Harry, finally. “Okay, stop.”

Louis stopped.

Harry thought a moment. “I just... I missed you. I stopped caring about anything.”

“I missed you too,” said Louis. “I cared too much. I always thought about that last day when we were bare and scared but I couldn't even stay—”

“So stay now,” said Harry.

Louis shuffled and smiled and the evening chickadees seemed to noisily agree.

Harry stepped forward. “Can I…?”

Louis squinted in the setting sun, eyes crinkling, and Harry was suddenly home.

Kissing was different now that Harry was tall and broad and had to crouch down against Louis’ angles, but he relished the difference, shading him like a tree and kissing him again and again. Because there was no one to tell them no, this time — no interdictions or old traditions or angry relatives. They left them all behind as they kissed, completely shameless, and caught by nothing but the sun, which seemed to crawl across the lake in ripples just to watch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm getting all emo right now. It's been a YEAR since I started this beast. And nearly 20,000 words later, a lot of people who were in fandom when I started probably aren't here anymore. 
> 
> I have to say THANK YOU to anyone who got this far. I know it takes me fucking AGES to update, and I'm sorry (my living as a professional editor/writer doesn't help in that regard — writing is hard when you do it all day long!). But this is the longest fic I've ever written, the longest I've ever been truly involved in a fandom, and the (almost) most invested I've ever been in a piece of writing outside of work.
> 
> This lake is real. There's a cabin, and it's been in my family for 100 years. I used to fantasize about running away and living there. I guess that's where this came from.
> 
> Thanks for reading. Find me on [tumblr](http://metal-eye.tumblr.com/).


End file.
